Competitor brand bidding for SaaS

Two questions decide whether conquesting is worth running, and most teams answer neither before switching it on. Can you write an ad that converts without using the other company’s name? And do you have a page good enough to receive the click when it lands?

If the answer to either is no, the campaign becomes a donation to Google. Conquest clicks are expensive, they convert poorly by design, and they arrive from someone who has already picked a favourite. The upside is real anyway, because the person searching a rival’s brand name is further down the buying process than anyone you will reach with a category keyword.

What follows is the policy, the copy, the page, the arithmetic, and the point at which the arithmetic stops working.

What Google’s trademark policy actually allows

Bidding on a rival’s trademark as a keyword is permitted. Using that trademark inside your ad text is restricted the moment the owner files a complaint. Those are two different rules and conflating them is the source of most of the confusion in this topic.

Google’s trademark policy has two carve-outs for ad text. Resellers of the trademarked product can use the mark if the landing page is clearly about that product. Informational sites can use it if the page provides substantive detail about the product rather than promoting a competing one. If you sell a competing SaaS product, you sit outside both exceptions, and an ad headline reading Better Than Salesforce will be disapproved once Salesforce has a complaint on file.

There is no such restriction on the keyword. You can bid on a competitor’s exact brand name, their product names, and their brand plus modifier queries, and Google will take your money for all of it. The company you are bidding against has no mechanism inside Google Ads to block that, which is exactly why branded search defense exists as a budget line.

How the complaint and takedown process actually runs

A trademark owner files through Google’s trademark complaint form, submits registration details, and lists the advertisers or regions the complaint covers. Google reviews and, if accepted, restricts that mark in ad text across the specified regions. Affected ads get disapproved, usually within a handful of business days.

What happens next is undramatic. Your ad stops serving, you rewrite the headline without the name, and the campaign continues. There is no penalty against the account for a first disapproval, no billing consequence, and no notification to the complainant about who you are. Teams that have been through it describe it as an inconvenience rather than an event.

The trademark owner can also authorise specific advertisers to use the mark, which is how partner and reseller programs work in practice. If you run an integrations marketplace or a certified partner program, getting your partners authorised is a five minute administrative task that most companies never do, and it quietly costs those partners their best headline.

Two legal reference points are worth knowing before this escalates past Google. In the UK, Interflora spent years litigating against Marks and Spencer over exactly this practice, and the operative test that came out of it is confusion: whether a reasonably well informed internet user could tell that the advertiser was not commercially connected to the trademark owner. In the US, the fight has generally turned on the ad and the landing page rather than the bid, under the Lanham Act’s false advertising and confusion provisions.

The wrinkle almost nobody mentions: agreements between competitors not to bid on each other’s brand terms have themselves been challenged as anticompetitive. The Federal Trade Commission brought exactly that case in the US contact lens market, and while the appellate outcome went against the FTC, the question is unsettled rather than resolved. If a rival proposes a mutual truce, that is a conversation for your general counsel, not a handshake between two heads of growth.

Ad copy that converts without naming the trademark

Write to the switching objection, not to the comparison. The searcher already knows the competitor’s name, so spending a headline on it buys nothing even when policy allows it.

Four patterns carry most of the performance in B2B software conquest campaigns:

• The migration promise: free migration, done in a week, we move your data for you
• The pricing model contrast: flat pricing, no per seat charge, no annual lock-in
• The specific capability the rival is publicly weak on: SOC 2 included, native Snowflake sync, offline mode
• The audience cut: built for teams of 200 plus, made for regulated industries, for finance teams rather than everyone

The strongest conquest headline usually names a constraint rather than a benefit. Unlimited Seats, Flat Price outperforms Better Project Management because it answers the reason someone typed the competitor’s name in the first place: they are checking whether the tool they already use is still the right call, and cost or a specific limitation is normally what put that question in their head.

Sitelinks do the naming work that the headline cannot. A sitelink labelled Migration Guide, another labelled Pricing Compared, another labelled Security and Compliance, and a fourth labelled Switching Checklist give you four more lines of real estate and route people by the objection they actually hold. There are worked versions of all of this in the SaaS ad copy swipe file, and live examples of who is doing it well in the SaaS Google Ads teardowns.

The landing page that has to receive the click

A comparison or alternatives page, never the homepage. The person clicking has told you the exact evaluation they are running, and a homepage makes them start it again from the top.

The gap here is large enough to decide the campaign. In accounts we have audited, sending conquest traffic to a dedicated comparison page rather than the homepage typically moves lead conversion from under 1 percent to somewhere between 2 and 3.5 percent. That is the difference between a campaign that clears its allowable cost and one that does not, and it costs a week of writing.

The page needs six things, and the first one is the one teams argue about:

1. A table where the competitor wins at least one row. A comparison page with a clean sweep of green ticks is read as marketing and discounted entirely.
2. Pricing stated in real numbers, sourced to the competitor’s public pricing page, with the date you checked it.
3. A migration path with a time estimate and who does the work.
4. One named customer who actually switched, with a quote about what broke and what got better.
5. The objection you lose on, addressed directly. If you have no mobile app and they do, say so.
6. A review and update date, visible, because a comparison page citing a plan the rival discontinued eight months ago is both useless and legally exposed.

Set a quarterly review on every comparison page you publish, and tie it to a calendar owner rather than a good intention. Competitors reprice, ship the feature you said they lacked, and drop the plan you compared against. A page that was accurate in March and wrong in September is a worse asset than no page at all.

What conquesting actually costs

Between 1.5 and 3 times your own brand cost per click, and the multiplier is driven by quality score rather than by competition alone. Google scores your ad and landing page relevance against the query, and the query is another company’s name.

Nothing on your page matches that term, so expected click through rate and ad relevance both score low, which raises the price you pay for the same position. This is structural. You cannot optimise your way out of it, though a comparison page that names the competitor in the H1 and title helps more than most people expect, precisely because it gives the relevance signal something to grab.

Notice which row is best. The competitor plus alternatives and competitor plus versus queries outperform the bare brand term on every metric and cost less, because the searcher has already declared that they are shopping. Bare competitor brand searches are mostly existing customers looking for a login page. Build your conquest program on modifier queries first and add the bare brand term last, if at all, and use a tight negative list to keep support traffic out of it. The starting set lives in the SaaS negative keyword list.

The break-even table nobody publishes

Work backwards from what a customer is allowed to cost. Required click to customer rate equals cost per click divided by allowable acquisition cost, and everything else is commentary.

Allowable acquisition cost here means twelve month gross profit, using an 80 percent gross margin, which is a common payback target for venture funded B2B software. Tighten it if your board wants payback inside two quarters.

Put a real funnel against that. A conquest click at $14, converting to a comparison page lead at 2.2 percent, with 35 percent of those leads becoming opportunities and 22 percent of opportunities closing, gives a click to customer rate of 0.17 percent and a cost per customer of about $8,300. At $25,000 ACV that is comfortable. At $8,000 ACV it is a loss you will not notice for two quarters because the sales cycle hides it.

The threshold lands around $10,000 ACV for most SaaS categories. Below it, the campaign needs a self-serve motion with no sales cost and a conversion rate the comparison page will not produce. Above roughly $100,000 ACV it still works, but the same budget spent on named account outbound usually returns more, which is a judgement call rather than a rule. The full version of this arithmetic, including how to set bids from it, is in SaaS PPC bid math.

The retaliation problem

Conquesting is a prisoner’s dilemma with a real price attached. If you bid on them and they bid on you, both companies pay more for the same total pool of demand, and neither reliably gains share.

The asymmetry is what decides who should start. A challenger bidding on the leader’s brand is buying access to a large demand pool it has no other route into, and the leader’s brand volume is worth many multiples of its own. The leader bidding on the challenger gains a small pool while handing the challenger a reason to attack a large one. Whoever has more brand search volume has more to lose, which is why the correct move for a category leader is to defend hard, file trademark complaints promptly, and stay out of the other company’s auction.

Watch this in categories where it has already run its course. Search a few project management or spend management brand names and count how many rivals show up. That crowding is the equilibrium the game produces, and every company in it is paying two to four times what they paid before it started. The one honest advantage: those categories are now so expensive that a well built comparison page ranking organically is worth more than any bid.

Who should run conquest campaigns and who should not

A short list, and most SaaS companies fall into the second half of it.

Skip it if you are the market leader, if your only asset is a homepage, if your ACV is under $10,000 with a sales-assisted motion, or if you have nothing to say about why someone would switch beyond being cheaper. Cheaper is the weakest conquest angle in B2B software, because the cost of migrating usually swamps the saving in year one and the buyer knows it.

Also skip it, for now, if your lead qualification is loose. Conquest traffic produces the most contested leads in any paid account: high intent, low fit, and prone to being tyre kickers doing competitive research. Sales will reject a chunk of them, and if you cannot tell which chunk, the campaign will be judged on cost per lead and killed for the wrong reason. Fix the definition first, using the approach in PPC lead quality for B2B SaaS.

Measurement and the traps in it

Judge conquest campaigns on opportunities and pipeline, never on cost per lead. The cost per lead will always look bad next to brand, and it is supposed to.

Three specific measurement traps recur. Competitor research traffic inflates lead volume with people who will never buy, so tag conquest leads at the campaign level and let sales mark them separately in the CRM. Assisted conversions understate conquesting badly, because a comparison page visit often precedes a branded search three weeks later that takes last click credit. And view-through data from any Display or video component will overstate it wildly, which is one reason conquest belongs in a search-only campaign.

Set up alerting rather than dashboard watching. Tools that monitor competitor ad copy and share of voice will tell you within a day when a rival changes their offer or enters your brand auction, which matters more than any weekly report. The options are compared in PPC tools for SaaS teams, and the reporting errors that make conquest campaigns look better or worse than they are show up again in the PPC mistakes that waste SaaS budget.

What to do in the next two weeks

Start with the page, not the campaign. Pick the one competitor you beat most often in deals, ask three sales reps for the exact objection that decides those deals, and write a comparison page that handles it honestly, including the row where the competitor wins. Publish it, let it index, and give it a month.

Then run the arithmetic before you run the campaign. Take your ACV, gross margin and payback target, work out the allowable acquisition cost, divide by the CPC your keyword tool quotes for the competitor’s brand term, and see what click to customer rate the campaign needs. If that number is above 0.2 percent, the campaign will probably not work and no amount of ad copy will fix it.

The position, stated plainly: conquesting earns its place when you are the challenger, you have a defensible comparison page, and there is a real switching story behind it. It is a bad idea for the category leader, who should spend the same money on defense and trademark enforcement instead. Everything else about running these campaigns properly sits in the SaaS PPC and paid ads hub.